Tech —

Amazon revamps Kindle, hints at bigger things to come

As expected, Amazon launched the Kindle 2, which was precisely as expected …

Last time Amazon held a press event for the Kindle, it was in the auditorium of a Union Square hotel and, although it had a full house, the ratio of press to partners was probably fairly low. This time around, Amazon hired the auditorium of the Morgan Library, housed in the financier's former mansion. In a sign of the Kindle's impact, there was a line out of the door for the event and the lower several rows of the auditorium were packed with at least a dozen television cameras. All this despite the fact that any suspense about the device itself was probably killed by the leaking of high-quality screen shots in the days leading up to it.

A sense of the approach was given by the announcement that "the show is about to start" just prior to Amazon head Jeff Bezos walking onto the stage. He started his pitch by saying that "Long-form reading is losing ground to short-form reading." But he argued that long-form remained an essential way of teaching; some things just can't be condensed to a short format. Their goal with the Kindle is to provide long-form reading with some of the best features allowed by the modern era of wireless electronics.

The Kindle has radically transformed Amazon's e-book sales, which now account for 10 percent of the titles it sells. The objective is to have the Kindle disappear while reading, much as a book does, and Bezos showed a series of pictures and quotes from its users, who are praising what the device has done for their reading habits.

The Kindle 2 is just as the leaked photos suggested. Bezos compared its 0.36 inch thickness favorably to those of various 3G cell phones; even the iPhone was significantly thicker. Many of the more problematic features of the first version are gone. The page control buttons are far smaller and less prone to flipping pages whenever the device is picked up. The LCD display that paralleled the screen on the right side and was used erratically and inconsistently in the past version—that's now gone. Instead of a click wheel, it now has a five-way controller (four directions plus press) for moving a cursor around the screen to replace many of the functions formerly handled by the LCD.

The ability to actually use a cursor was enabled by a newer E-Ink screen, which handles page turns 25 percent faster than the earlier iteration. The device has seven times the storage (2GB for up to 1,500 books) and has switched to 3G networking. Despite that, Bezos claimed the battery life is 25 percent longer, lasting for up to two weeks of reading. It also has a built-in speaker, and they've enabled text-to-speech for everything, although the voice has a vaguely robotic character.

The keyboard, although redesigned, is still there. It's clearly a necessity for the device, which is designed to operate without requiring an interface with a PC, but it's simply not consistent with Amazon's intention of having the device disappear during reading. It also shortens the screen, making page turning a much more significant part of the experience.

The content, especially newspapers, has undergone a bit of a revision. Bezos showed how The New York Times has been modified to provide a lede with a taste of the story on the first screen, making it easier to make a quick decision about whether to read the full text or skip to the next screen.

Early in the talk, Bezos dropped a hint that the introduction would be about more than just Amazon's own hardware, when he mentioned a feature called "whisper sync," which will keep track of what users are reading and where they are within the content across different devices—"Kindle 1, Kindle 2, and other mobile devices," as Bezos put it. But he never returned to the topic, leaving the company's long-term plans an open question. Instead, Stephen King was brought on to read from a short story that will be a Kindle exclusive—for Amazon, there wasn't one more thing.